kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and even imperious if thwarted or interfered with.  He must always have been fearless,—­in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary kind.  And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost, killing Polonius, dealing with the King’s commission on the ship, boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final vengeance, could ever have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.  Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!

If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet’s was a weak and one-sided character?  ’Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at a University!’ Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without becoming the victim of excessive thought.  But the statement that he did rests upon a most insecure foundation.[40]

Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?

(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the word; there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were joyous or depressed.  This temperament the Elizabethans would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine.  And the doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare’s time—­as Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show—­that Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet consciously and deliberately.  Of melancholy in its developed form, a habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks.  He more than once laughs at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don John in Much Ado he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio in the Merchant of Venice a quiet but deep melancholy, for which neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41] He gives to Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger.  In the play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet is quite different.